DirtonDirt.com exclusive
Memories of crewing for the Southern Gentleman
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt.com senior writer
Gary Winger (background) after a Freddy Smith victory in 2001. (David Allio/racingphotoarchives.com)
Gary Winger was riding high Saturday at Whynot Motorsports Park in Meridian, Miss. He'd just watched his son, Ashton, execute a third-to-first outside charge in the closing stages of a 60-lapper to capture the 29th annual Coors Light Fall Classic’s $15,000 top prize, so he was anticipating a joyous ride home to Hampton, Ga. | Arrangements
But an opposite emotion soon overtook him as he stood in the pit area basking in his 23-year-old boy’s triumph. Fresh news reached him via his wife, Lynn, that one of his racing heroes, Hall of Famer Freddy Smith, had died at the age of 76 after a battle with leukemia.
“It sucked, because I literally come back from victory lane and my phone was going crazy and I didn’t pay no attention to it because I just figured it was just everybody texting us about winning,” said Winger, who serves as his son’s crew chief while not tending to his GW Performance shock business. “But it was Lynn calling me over and over, so I answered.”
Lynn, who spent the night back home watching the live stream of her son’s second career Fall Classic checkered flag, had just learned about Smith’s passing in a North Carolina hospital from Paula Huppert, the wife of Smith’s close friend Jack Huppert. Lynn knew her husband would want to know the sad news before it hit social media so she was relentless in dialing his cell phone.
“I was happy we won,” Winger said, “but hearing about Freddy took away from it.”
There are people who knew Smith longer than Winger, and people who were more connected to him. But Winger’s three-plus years working as a crewman for Smith — and living in close proximity to the driver — from 2000-03 turned him into a life-long admirer of the man he always calls “Five Time” in recognition of Smith’s record number of victories in the Dirt Track World Championship.
“Everybody knows Freddy the racer, which is obviously a very, very decorated career,” Winger said. “But he’s just a good dude, man. We lost a helluva good human, you know what I mean?
“Freddy Smith the race car driver, that’s easy to talk about. Freddy Smith the person, that’s what gets me broke up.”
Speaking by phone Monday evening, Winger’s memories of Smith poured out. He could have gone on for hours about the well-known Southern Gentleman, especially that special slice of time when he was not yet 30 and traveling around the country with a Dirt Late Model legend.
Winger noted that his first year working for Smith’s Clayton Christenberry-owned team — he was lured to the operation for the 2000 season by his good buddy Jimmy Cabral, then Smith’s crew chief — happened to coincide with Ashton’s arrival. Ashton was born on Jan. 22, 2000, and just days later he was living in a home near Smith on Christenberry’s farm in Knoxville, Tenn.
“Honestly, the day after Ashton got out of the hospital, we moved Lynn and Ashton up to Knoxville where I was at,” Winger said. “I’m telling you, from like the fifth day after he was born, he was around Freddy. We lived right there on the farm, 250 yards from (Smith) and (Smith’s wife) Naomi, and that’s where he spent the first few years of his life. So Freddy, he literally had seen Ashton grow up from Day One.”
As a result, Smith developed a keen interest in Ashton, especially in recent years as the outgoing racer has blossomed into a top driving prospect in the Dirt Late Model division.
“Even as recently as probably a month ago, Freddy would call whenever Ashton would do good,” Winger said. “And he’d call and get on me whenever Ashton would do bad, and he’d say, ‘You tell that boy to do this and that.’
“And, like, when all that stuff happened with G.R. (Smith), he called to check on me and he checked on Ashton,” he continued, referring to Ashton Winger’s March incident with G.R. Smith at Southern Raceway in Milton, Fla. “Then, not every time, but when Ashton would go on a string and run good, he’d call me and say, ‘Man, Ashton’s doing good. I’m proud of him.’ ”
Winger has placed Smith on a pedestal that he points at often while schooling his son in the racing game. In Winger’s mind, there can be no better role model for a racer than Smith.
“I’ve done my best with Ashton to be like, ‘That’s who you need to be like,’ ” Winger said. “I told him, ‘If we’re gonna change race cars (brands), you need to be honest and up front about it. If we need to change shocks, if these people have helped you, you need to do right by them.’
“Here’s the one thing I’ll tell you about that guy: I would challenge you to find one person in this entire industry that has one bad thing to say about how he did business or how he handled himself or any of that. I dare you to find anyone in racing who would say, ‘That guy just screwed me over!’ You won’t find that, and that’s really, really, really rare.”
Smith already had Hall of Fame credentials when Winger began turning wrenches. He was, in fact, 53 years old, and essentially in the twilight of a career that he would end with his 2012 retirement, but he still could get the job done. With Winger on board, Smith won his second $100,000 Dream at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, in 2000, and also, in ’01, added his second Show-Me 100 triumph at West Plains (Mo.) Motor Speedway.
That Dream victory still sticks out in Winger’s memory bank.
“What I remember about that is, we qualified on Friday night and qualified 35th,” Winger said. “Back then (Eldora) didn’t have no (inversion) wheel or nothing so you just knew you were gonna start sixth in the fifth (heat), which is like the golden ticket for that race (setting the winner up to start on the outside pole in the 100-lap feature). But I’ll never forget — Freddy wanted to change motors (before Saturday’s program). We qualified with a big motor and the next day we knew we were starting sixth in the heat and he thought the racetrack was gonna be slick, so we put a 350 (cubic inch engine) in, and I’m telling you, I remember me and Jimmy were changing it, and I was thinking to myself, This may be the dumbest thing we’ve ever done, because Eldora’s big, you know? But he was pretty direct about what he wanted, even if we thought it was right or wrong or whatever — and obviously more often than not, it worked.
“Well, he won the heat, so we started on the outside front row and he was really, really good. (The race) was somewhere in the high 90s (in laps) and he come around and me and Jimmy were standing down on the (inside) fence in (turns) one and two and Jimmy was giving him signals — nobody had (signal) sticks then — and he couldn’t get his arms no further apart telling him he had room (on second place).
“Then probably lap 97, 98, he come through one and two and he looked dead over at me and Jimmy and took his hand off the wheel and gave us a thumbs up,” he continued. “I’m telling you, me and Jimmy just looked at each other. I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me!’ We just told him after the race, ‘You keep your hands on the wheel, man.’ ”
Winger recalled another racetrack moment with Smith during a STARS-sanctioned event in late August 2001 that Smith won at Florence Speedway in Union, Ky.
“Somebody just shared a picture (from that night) on Facebook of me, Jimmy and Freddy,” Winger said. “I can’t remember if it was a 60-lap race or whatever, but me and Jimmy had convinced (Smith) to put this thing on (a) two-barrel (carburetor) because the racetrack at Florence was always so slick. Well, he’s old school, and it’s almost like cursing them guys if you want to tell ‘em to do anything about throttle control, because they had it (naturally in their right foot), you know what I mean? ‘We don’t need to that. I know how to keep this thing from spinning the tires,’ he said.
“Well, against his will he let us do that, and actually it was good for the first 40 or so laps because it was so slick, and he was killing them guys. But I’ll never forget, the racetrack rubbered up and picked up (speed), and for the last 10 laps this Darrell Lanigan just about knocked the fuel cell out of (Smith’s car) because we couldn’t go (with reduced power). I mean, he was on a little two-barrel and it had rubbered up, so you essentially didn’t have any motor, and this Lanigan just beat the back bumper off for the last 10 laps.
“It’s funny,” he added. “We didn’t have DirtonDirt back then, so on the picture on the front page of that (week’s) Racing News (paper) they had, it was Freddy turned around looking at me and Jimmy and he’s telling us … I think his exact words were that if we ever put his race car on two barrels again he’s gonna fire us. I was like, ‘This guy’s mad, and we won!’ He did not like getting that back bumper beat off the last 10 laps. He didn’t think much of that.”
In that vein, unnecessary contact displeased Smith. He was well known as a clean, respectful driver, and Winger realized that from the way Smith typically brought his car back to the trailer after races.
“Me and Jimmy Cabral would always joke, we never had to really work on anything until it was, like, really bad,” Winger said. “If we had to work on something, we’d usually have to go build a car or something. There wasn’t a lot of beating body panels out, changing suspension, stuff like that, because he just had a knack staying out of trouble.”
Winger noted that traveling between races was often more eventful than their time at the track or in the shop. Smith traveled Naomi in his well-worn RV with his T-shirt trailer behind it and the trips weren’t always smooth, like one where Smith did some interesting jerry-rigging to keep rolling down the highway.
“The antics of riding up-and-down the road with that guy were always fun,” said Winger, who traveled separately with Cabral in the race car hauler. “One time, I can’t remember where it was at — I wanna say we were out in Iowa somewhere — and the throttle linkage broke in his motorhome when we were trying to get from one track to the next. Well, he rigged up a stereo speaker wire to the throttle cable of this thing. The motor was under the bed in the back of the motorhome there, and he was going down the road pulling this thing for throttle — like, he’d pull the stereo wire and that’s how he’d work the throttle on this motorhome.
“It was actually working pretty good until we get, I don’t know, 50, 100 miles down the road there, and it was wearing his arm out. So then he tied this thing to the arm rest on the seat of his dang motorhome, and he’d (lean) the seat forward to go faster and backwards to go slower. It was just all the time stuff like that.”
Winger will always cherish his years with Smith, years when Winger and Cabral — both up-and-coming mechanics — would continually “mess with Freddy because he was old school, just all the time pulling stuff on him or whatever, trying to keep him young.”
And if he’s asked where Smith should rank on any list of the all-time greatest Dirt Late Model drivers, Winger will inevitably give the same response.
“Well, I’m biased, but here’s what I’ve always said about Freddy,” Winger said. “I think he’s a little bit underrated because, when Dirt Late Model racing kind of took off in the path that it is now (with two full-fledged national tours), Freddy was sort of at the end of his deal.
“But what I will tell you is, and this is all personal opinion, there’s guys that are being thrown around as the GOAT that I’m old enough to know that, in certain kinds of cars, they weren’t that good in. Freddy Smith was good in everything. Freddy Smith was good when we used cars out of junkyards. Freddy Smith was good when we ran wedge-body cars. Freddy Smith was good when we went to just plain straight-up, completely hand-built race cars. Freddy Smith was good when we went to cantilevers. Freddy Smith was good when we went to four-bar suspensions from leaf-springs. And then from shock-in-front to shock-behind, this guy never slowed down. He won races in every single one of those eras. This guy, I would always cut up with him and tell him that I wasn’t around for it, but when he was racing horse and buggies, I’m sure he was fast.
“So if you ask me — and I’m biased because I had a personal relationship with the guy — but I think he’s, if not the best, then one of the best, for sure one of the top three.”
